OTR: On The Rise

Just north of downtown Cincinnati lies Over The Rhine. Once one of the city’s most prized cultural possessions, today the area is plagued with crime and violence. However, upon a closer look, one can find shining beacons of light that are promoting change for the nation’s most dangerous neighborhood in 2009.

Music by the Prohibitionists.

Featured :

UrbanCincy.com , Heavy Gun.Blogspot , Cincinnati 10 , UPI.com , Fountain Square 3CDC Light-Board downtown Cincinnati.

Cincinnati Man Casually Devotes Life To Cycling – MARTY

It’s rare you meet an individual so interesting and intriguing that you can shoot a story on them. Thats exactly how Sean Fannin and I felt about Martin Sanders though. This was made for DSSM in Electronic Media. This is a 100% original work from the music to camera work. Enjoy!

Featured on reserbicycle.com , 3CDC Fountain Square Light board – downtown Cincinnati.

Download: marty_mcfly.mp3?1292473563

And here’s the track Marty Mcfly that I put together for the montage sequence using Logic.

Breakfast

Created for an Electronic Media class at the University of Cincinnati. Sean Fannin & Kerry O’Connor.

Micha and Robin

I was invited to film the Ribback Wedding this past Saturday. It took place about an hour south of Munich at a place called Herrsching am Ammersee. It was quite an amazing ceremony, with plenty of interesting people attending. It was very intriguing to see the differences between an American wedding and a German wedding, as surprisingly there are quite a few.

This a the video I was asked to do. Robin and Micha met ballroom dancing in Austria two years ago, so I found it only fitting to use “Blue Danube” as the song.

Surreal Munich

Shot a bit at the small fair next to the Olympic Village the other night. All in 60fps, slowed down to 1/2x speed.  The song is Surreal by Markus Schulz. Apparently I really like his new album Do You Dream, because this is the second video I’ve made with music from the release.

Clifton Cincinnati 7Dusk

I recently had the opportunity to purchase a Canon 7d. The big thing about the new DSLR’s is their ability to capture ridiculously good HD video directly at the film quality frame rate of 24p.  I shot this at Fairview Park in Clifton, Cincinnati.  It’s just a few shots put to music. The song is called Alpha State by Markus Schulz.  I went for the whole movie intro feel, hope it’s not too cheesy for ya!

Hardware

The 7d’s are very popular right now. A lot of people are using many different configurations, and when trying to decide what to buy to go with the camera, the situation can become pretty cumbersome.  In case you’re wondering, This was shot in 1080p at 24 frames per second.  I used the lens I got with the camera, which is a 28-135mm IS Canon.  I also used a 200x Ultra CF card.

Setup
This was the most helpful thing in the world. It’s a short video on how to set up presets for video.  Since video requires specific ISO and shutter speed settings to look it’s best, you absolutely have to watch this video to see how to set it up. It helped immensely.The lens was IMAGE STABILIZED, which is slightly noisy, but if you’re cutting out the audio it’s not an issue. If you need the audio I would recommend trying a mic or see if you can get away with not using the image stabilizer.

Post

I converted it to Apple Pro Res in Final cut and exported it as a quicktime movie (the simplest way), then scaled it down to a computer friendly version with quicktime, this way it was much smaller to upload [71mb instead of 875mb]. The quality remained pretty much the same. I also wan to mention that none of the shots were color corrected or stabilized in post, they are all straight from the camera.

Other Issues

One thing I noticed after having the camera for only two days, is that while in video mode, it’s extremely hard to focus. Some have suggested racking focus or using the autofocus in still mode, then switching over to video.  I find that I use a lot of focus techniques within the filming itself, so I just take a lot of shots so I have the right one.  Also when zooming, it likes to change the aperture accordingly, not sure if you can turn that off yet…but as you can see none of the shots I used in the video were affected by it.

Overall I’m extremely happy with my decision to sell my Nikon D300 and go with the 7d. I haven’t ever heard anyone being disappointed with choosing the 7d.  If you are thinking about picking one up, do it sooner than later, it took me 6 months to decide and after two days I’m already wishing I had been able to use it for so many projects.

Framing & Composition / Trainspotting Teaser

This was made for a framing & composition class at the university of Cincinnati. It’s also a preview for the upcoming music video for “trainspotting” by Zac Miller.